are not clear. Most of the expense and engineering must have come from Qin. Given that the distance from the Wei valley to Chengdu is about 500 kilometers, it is unlikely that the whole road was built at once. Sage remarks that "determining the Qinling portion of the route was once one of those perennial quibbles like the attempts to find Hannibal's path through the Alps." His view is that the Qinling portion corresponds to the Baoxie Plank Road. This ran from southeast of the Qin capital of Yong, up the north-flowing Xie River, over a pass west of Mount Taibai and southwest down the Bao River to Hanzhong on the Han River. From there it went west-southwest over the Daba Mountains using the Wu Deng Pass ('Wu Deng' were the 'Five Strongmen' who carried the cattle to Shu) and entered the Sichuan Basin at the Jian Men or Sword Gate, a route that is similar to the modern Xi'an-Chengdu highway. Sage thinks that the Stone Cattle Road proper was the segment south of the Daba Mountains, although the term was used loosely for the whole route. There was also an 'old road' ('gu dao') west of the Qinling portion which Liu Bang used for his initial breakout of the Han valley. This probably corresponds to the modern S210 highway. After the conquest there was a 'Rice Granary Road' that went south from Hanzhong and then swung west. As Sichuan became more developed there were other roads of greater or lesser importance. Notes References John Keay, China - A History,2009, Harper Collins, Stephen F. Sage, Ancient Sichuan and the Unification of China, 1992 History of Sichuan History of ancient China Roads in China Ancient_roads_and_tracks